Robert Mugabe

Tyrannosaurus Rex

WHEN he first came to power in Zimbabwe 22 years ago, committed to a policy of reconciliation, Robert Mugabe was hailed as a great African statesman. Today he is seen as just another elderly African despot. He has ruined a once sound economy, and is having to count on ballot rigging and murderous thugs to win him re-election next month (see article). What went wrong?

Martin Meredith, a prolific and knowledgeable writer on southern Africa, believes that exaggerated hopes caused predictable disappointment. The West was so desperate for an African success story that it resolutely overlooked Mr Mugabe's manifest inadequacies. The president was never committed to democracy, Mr Meredith says. Only relentless pressure from the African countries that provided bases and support for his guerrillas persuaded him to negotiate with Ian Smith's regime. He wanted to continue a “liberation struggle” that had already cost 30,000 lives and so win a revolutionary mandate to impose a one-party state.

Mr Mugabe's western backers, including the IMF and the World Bank, remained blinkered even when he unleashed his North Korean trained 5th Brigade on the Ndebele people, the old enemy of Zimbabwe's Shona majority. These soldiers waged a campaign of mass murder.

The Mugabe government's economic failures were harder to ignore. As the economy went into free fall, with much of the country's productive white commercial farmland being acquired by Zanu-PF's citified elite, the country faced starvation. Desperate for somebody else to blame, Mr Mugabe demonised the whites at home and abroad. Many who stayed on after 1980 have recently left.

Mr Meredith's book has been hurried out before the presidential election. It has no introduction and a shoddy index, and the new names of towns on its map become old names in the text, so that Kwekwe remains Que Que and Gweru is still Gwelo. But these are minor faults in the best argued and best written indictment yet of the man Nelson Mandela mockingly calls Comrade Bob.